Heã¢â‚¬â„¢s Making Us Proud Again Gerald Ford

This speech was given past President Ford amongst the international turmoil surrounding the end of the Vietnam State of war in April 1975. On the very solar day the President gave this spoken communication, 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were advancing toward Saigon, S Vietnam'southward capital. Meanwhile, leaders from around the world, and the Due north Vietnamese themselves, waited to see how the United States would react to the pending collapse of South Vietnam, which the U.S. had fought hard to preserve.

The respond came from President Ford during this spoken language in which he alleged the conflict "a state of war that is finished every bit far as America is concerned," and urged the young Americans in his audience at Tulane Academy to look toward the hereafter instead.

A calendar week later, Saigon brutal and S Vietnam surrendered to the Due north Vietnamese. Vietnam was thus unified under a Communist regime that remains in power today.

Listen to the entire speech

Each time that I have been privileged to visit Tulane, I have come away newly impressed with the intense application of the student body to the slap-up problems of our fourth dimension, and I am pleased this evening to observe that your involvement hasn't changed ane scrap.

As we came into the building this night, I passed a pupil who looked up from his book and said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins but with a single stride." To indicate my interest in him, I asked, "Are you trying to effigy out how to get your goal in life?" He said, "No, I am trying to figure out how to get to the Super Dome in September." [Laughter] Well, I don't think in that location is whatsoever doubt in my mind that all of you will get to the Super Dome. Of course, I hope it is to run into the Greenish Wave [Tulane Academy] have their very all-time season on the gridiron. I have sort of a feeling that you wouldn't heed making this another year in which you put the Tigers [Louisiana State Academy] in your tank.

When I had the privilege of speaking here in 1968 at your "Directions '68" forum, I had no thought that my own career and our entire Nation would move and so soon in another management. And I say again, I am extremely proud to exist invited back.

I am impressed, equally I undoubtedly said before -- but I would reiterate it tonight -- by Tulane'due south unique distinction equally the only American academy to be converted from State sponsorship to individual condition. And I am also impressed past the Tulane graduates who serve in the United States Congress: Bennett Johnston, Lindy Boggs, Dave Treen.

Eddie Hebert, when I asked him the question whether he was or not, and he said he got a special degree: Dropout '28. [Laughter]

But I recall the fact that y'all take these 3 outstanding graduates testifies to the academic excellence and the inspiration of this historic university, rooted in the past with its eyes on the future.

But as Tulane has made a bang-up transition from the past to the future, so has New Orleans, the legendary metropolis that has made such a unique contribution to our great America. New Orleans is more, as I come across it, than weathered bricks and cast-iron balconies. It is a state of mind, a melting pot that represents the very, very best of America's evolution, an example of retention of a very special civilization in a progressive environment of modern alter.

On Jan 8, 1815, a monumental American victory was achieved here -- the Battle of New Orleans. Louisiana had been a State for less than iii years, but outnumbered Americans innovated, outnumbered Americans used the tactics of the frontier to defeat a veteran British strength trained in the strategy of the Napoleonic wars.

We as a nation had suffered humiliation and a mensurate of defeat in the War of 1812. Our National Capital in Washington had been captured and burned. Then, the illustrious victory in the Battle of New Orleans was a powerful restorative to our national pride.

Still, the victory at New Orleans actually took place 2 weeks after the signing of the ceasefire in Europe. Thousands died although a peace had been negotiated. The combatants had not gotten the give-and-take. Nonetheless, the ballsy struggle nevertheless restored America's pride.

Today, America tin regain the sense of pride that existed earlier Vietnam. But information technology cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I come across it, the time has come to look forward to an calendar for the future, to unify, to bind upwardly the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.

In New Orleans, a neat boxing was fought after a war was over. In New Orleans tonight, we can begin a great national reconciliation. The kickoff engagement must be with the issues of today, but only as chiefly, the problems of the future. That is why I think it is so advisable that I find myself tonight at a university which addresses itself to preparing immature people for the challenge of tomorrow.

I ask that we finish refighting the battles and the recriminations of the past. I ask that we expect now at what is right with America, at our possibilities and our potentialities for modify and growth and achievement and sharing. I enquire that we take the responsibilities of leadership equally a good neighbor to all peoples and the enemy of none. I ask that nosotros strive to become, in the finest American tradition, something more tomorrow than we are today.

Instead of my addressing the image of America, I adopt to consider the reality of America. Information technology is truthful that we have launched our Bicentennial celebration without having achieved human perfection, just we have attained a very remarkable self-governed society that possesses the flexibility and the dynamism to grow and undertake an entirely new agenda, an agenda for America's third century.

Then, I ask you to join me in helping to write that agenda. I am as determined every bit a President tin exist to seek national rediscovery of the belief in ourselves that characterized the about artistic periods in our Nation's history. The greatest claiming of creativity, every bit I run into it, lies ahead.

We, of grade, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the stop of the world nor of America'southward leadership in the world.

Let me put it this style, if I might. Some tend to feel that if we practice not succeed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded in nothing anywhere. I turn down categorically such polarized thinking. We can and we should assist others to assistance themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own easily, not in ours.

America's futurity depends upon Americans -- especially your generation, which is now equipping itself to assume the challenges of the future, to aid write the calendar for America.

Earlier today, in this great community, I spoke about the need to maintain our defenses. Tonight, I would like to talk most another kind of force, the true source of American power that transcends all of the deterrent powers for peace of our Military machine. I am speaking hither of our belief in ourselves and our conventionalities in our Nation.

Abraham Lincoln asked, in his ain words, and I quote, "What constitutes the bulwark of our own freedom and independence?" And he answered, "It is non our frowning battlements or bristling seacoasts, our Ground forces or our Navy. Our defense force is in the spirit which prized liberty equally the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere."

It is in this spirit that we must now move beyond the discords of the past decade. Information technology is in this spirit that I ask you to join me in writing an agenda for the future.

I welcome your invitation particularly tonight, considering I know it is at Tulane and other centers of idea throughout our great state that much consideration is existence given to the kind of futurity Americans want and, merely every bit chiefly, volition work for. Each of you lot are preparing yourselves for the future, and I am deeply interested in your preparations and your opinions and your goals. Nonetheless, this evening, with your indulgence, let me share with yous my own views.

I envision a creative plan that goes as far equally our backbone and our capacities can have us, both at home and abroad. My goal is for a cooperative earth at peace, using its resources to build, non to destroy.

As President, I am determined to offer leadership to overcome our current economic problems. My goal is for jobs for all who want to work and economical opportunity for all who want to accomplish.

I am determined to seek self-sufficiency in free energy as an urgent national priority. My goal is to brand America independent of foreign energy sources by 1985.

Of course, I will pursue interdependence with other nations and a reformed international economic system. My goal is for a globe in which consuming and producing nations achieve a working remainder.

I volition address the humanitarian bug of hunger and famine, of health and of healing. My goal is to achieve -- or to clinch basic needs and an effective system to achieve this result.

I recognize the need for engineering that enriches life while preserving our natural surround. My goal is to stimulate productivity, but utilise technology to redeem, not to destroy our environs.

I will strive for new cooperation rather than conflict in the peaceful exploration of our oceans and our space. My goal is to use resources for peaceful progress rather than war and destruction.

Let America symbolize humanity's struggle to conquer nature and master technology. The fourth dimension has now come for our Government to facilitate the individual's control over his or her future -- and of the future of America.

Simply the future requires more than Americans congratulating themselves on how much we know and how many products that nosotros tin can produce. It requires new cognition to see new bug. Nosotros must not only be motivated to build a better America, we must know how to do it.

If we actually want a humane America that will, for case, contribute to the alleviation of the world's hunger, we must realize that skilful intentions practice not feed people. Some problems, as anyone who served in the Congress knows, are complex. There arc no easy answers. Willpower lonely does not grow food.

We thought, in a well-intentioned past, that we could export our engineering science lock, stock, and barrel to developing nations. We did it with the all-time of intentions. Only we are now learning that a strain of rice that grows in ane place will not grow in another; that factories that produce at 100 percent in one nation produce less than half every bit much in a society where temperaments and work habits are somewhat different.

Yet, the world economy has become interdependent. Not only food technology just money management, natural resources and energy, research and development -- all kinds of this group require an organized world society that makes the maximum effective utilise of the globe's resources.

I want to tell the world: Let'due south abound food together, but let's also acquire more than about nutrition, about weather forecasting, about irrigation, about the many other specialties involved in helping people to help themselves.

We must larn more about people, nearly the evolution of communities, architecture, engineering, instruction, motivation, productivity, public health and medicine, arts and sciences, political, legal, and social system. All of these specialities and many, many more are required if immature people like y'all are to help this Nation develop an agenda for our hereafter -- your futurity, our state'due south futurity.

I challenge, for case, the medical students in this audition to put on their calendar the accomplishment of a cure for cancer. I challenge the engineers in this audition to devise new techniques for developing cheap, make clean, and plentiful energy, and equally a byproduct, to control floods. I claiming the police students in this audience to find ways to speed the administration of equal justice and brand adept citizens out of convicted criminals. I claiming didactics, those of you as education majors, to do existent teaching for existent life. I claiming the arts majors in this audience to compose the smashing American symphony, to write the neat American novel, and to enrich and inspire our daily lives.

America's leadership is essential. America's resource are vast. America'southward opportunities are unprecedented.

Equally nosotros strive together to prefect a new agenda, I put high on the list of important points the maintenance of alliances and partnerships with other people and other nations. These exercise provide a basis of shared values, even as we stand up upwardly with determination for what we believe. This, of course, requires a continuing delivery to peace and a conclusion to employ our good offices wherever possible to promote better relations between nations of this globe.

The new agenda, that which is developed by you lot and by us, must place a loftier priority on the need to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to piece of work for the mutual reduction in strategic arms and control of other weapons. And I must say, parenthetically, the successful negotiations at Vladivostok, in my opinion, are just a beginning.

Your generation of Americans is uniquely endowed by history to give new pregnant to the pride and spirit of America. The magnetism of an American society, confident of its ain strength, will attract the skillful will and the esteem of all people wherever they might be in this globe in which we live. Information technology volition enhance our own perception of ourselves and our pride in being an American. We can, we -- and I say information technology with accent -- write a new calendar for our future.

I am glad that Tulane Academy and other dandy American educational institutions are reaching out to others in programs to piece of work with developing nations, and I look forward with confidence to your participation in every aspect of America's future.

And I urge Americans of all ages to unite in this Bicentennial year, to accept responsibility for themselves as our ancestors did. Let united states of america resolve this night to rediscover the sometime virtues of conviction and self-reliance and capability that characterized our forefathers ii centuries ago. I pledge, as I know you practise, each one of u.s., to do our part.

Allow the beacon lite of the past shine along from historic New Orleans and from Tulane University and from every other corner of this land to illuminate a boundless future for all Americans and a peace for all mankind.

Thank you lot very much.

President Gerald R. Ford - April 23, 1975

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